In London where I've lived and worked, the real mudlark, the historical one, was a child who lived in the gutter, as it were, and kept himself alive by working the mud-banks of Thames River, "Down Greenwich reach / Past the Isle of Dogs" ("The Waste Land") where England's own and the world's ships plied their trade. The mudlark's job description, if he had one, would likely read: scavenger. His survival, outside the political and economic systems that governed the official life of his time, depended on whatever he could find—"empty bottles, sandwich papers, / silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends"—that the river had left behind. Anything on which he could put a price, anything that had value on the street. (Wm Slaughter, editor)

Mudlark i, Ghoul’s Night

A thin shell of iron between earth & heaven. Heaven? Untranslatable, state of ethereal beingwhere you are a silk-weaver & mill silk clothing in the next room.Clothes are a translation into fairytale being.

It was like transposing a musical comspoition from one key to another one:A + to A- major to minorshifting energy & emotion like an Asian language into a Slavic one not only images but a mood conversion.

The reality?Outworks. The mudlark was a scavenger, street ruffian, hooligan. Outline of town: Rimmed with red smokestacks.Give me no pencil drawings. I want love with its skin back on.The blue printing press is standing in a pool of moonlight with lead trays ready to do their printing. Alphabet angel.Trees with end-of-the world lighting.

I hear weeping between floors. Always. Leftover from childhood?The walking wounded. Children we could not walk.Charon rows his boat in over waves of red iron. Cold Night in Nebraksa—as in Siberia, the steppes:Could the plains be more stone-frozen?I wanted to be the bell in your cap the lightning in your jar, running up & down your limbs All the carbon rings are consumed. Obliquely I might be translated into Russian.

Like me patient as a plant as a penitent. Penitentional, Dusk fills me to the brim & in. Another close brush with the end.Night lids town. The cars flow on slow as taffy freezing But with the last firecrack shines rain Too bright a light augurs doom: no nouns or verbs can transliterate this state into another condition:this is an altered state of beinglike translation in to an extinct tongueI go to sleep under an eider of dawn.

The storyteller in me creates molten shapes, language conversions, caressing Slavic vowel sounds then reeling with all this conversion, transfer, back to root zero: pre-verbal child.

Sir Serene the Thames winds on under bridges snaking elbow bends.Mudlark, I am hopping first on one foot, then the other blowing on tattered knuckles, 9 years of ageas in Medieval times. Every day my love withdraws from me like sun from land. I bite my brightness back like thread tone kilowatts, candlepower down: Sir Serene city’s a glazed fruit cake, boiled icing, nuggets of orange & green. Dark as the dung-house I hunker licking fingers feral, ferrous: take heart blood radiance is rough enough, a diamond dimming: Mudlark goes in the darkness, hopping to get blood flowing, folding, a brown ring, drab thing, his scruff-nest, a hoop around him.

Mudlark iii, Dark as an outhouse

Dark as an outhouse, shistkebindthough I have no German bone in memy sleeping hut

my shell.Pinpricks of light from it I seebarge boats on the Thames.

To be a lighterboy transferring language from the streets to the rivers a water-translation:rather than mudlark.I have caked blood which smells like old metal

me slumped against barn wallafter being taken by the soldiera random act red as wild rose in summer

a moment’s warmth, sparks flying like from a horse’s hooves.Cows’ breathhangs like crystal wreathes in the night. Laughter thru tears, the Slavic genius.

Reading Pushkinby candlelightin the hay could have set me on fire but not kept me at a steady warmth

like the lightunder the chicksincubating.

Mother Russia, these scratchy ash grey wool stockings. Mother Russia her Byzantine onion domes, her onions in a pan turn to translucent skins warming.they say a person is like an onion: peel them of the many layers to get to core.

I can see a clear path (on a roll, sweet rolls stuffed in my pocket)outevery now and then as I squint eyes. There is no translation. Once gay, now gray:Lighterboy mudlark transferring coin from one pocket to the otherexchanging language from head to heart:

after the brute factthe actslumped in my bloods as in shawls against the splintered side of this barn.